spewing

I've meant to write about this before and just never have, but a couple of recent conversations have pushed it forward into my consciousness. A friend was talking to me about a mutual friend, whom a third (fourth? this is getting convoluted) friend had described as being recently distraught. The first friend expressed to me that she was somewhat dreading spending time with putatively distraught friend #2, because in her experience friend #2 was resolutely negative when worried about something and "you can't give her any advice," and this irritates friend #1.

It seemed alien to her that friend #2 might want to spew without looking for a solution. It seemed perfectly normal to me, since in my own anxiety-disorder-flavored world, I often process the same way. When a bunch of negativity--whether that be worry, sadness, or anger--takes up space in my head, in order for it not to get stuck in there and create a feedback loop of disordered thought, I often just need to express it, to dump it out, to spew, in order to let it go. Just the physical process of expressing it makes it into something manageable. I tried gently to explain this to friend #1.

"But you don't do that," she said, puzzled. I almost burst out laughing, and thought but didn't say, Well, maybe not to you, but that's what the blog's for.

And it brought to mind another recent conversation, as well as a few offhand remarks from various people who do read my blog and who apparently assign much greater significance to some of my ranting than I do. I've had people bring up to me things I'd posted about months before and more or less forgotten about, even if I was really pissed or really depressed at the time, as if they were truly significant, and it was my turn to be puzzled. Perhaps if I hadn't spewed them, they'd have remained in my head and grown into something I'd still be stewing about or obsessing over six months later. But having expressed them, they were just bits of negativity that could be examined and set free.

We all have our ways of managing our emotions, except I guess for those of us with no coping skills at all, and this is one of mine. My apologies if that has ever annoyed or misled any of my readers, because I value that you exist, and I value your reading those rants. (Except if you hate reading them, in which case I hope you skip them and come back when I'm actually being entertaining.)

But for future reference, if it doesn't involve someone screwing over my kid, I'm probably not that angry or bitter or sad about it, and you can assume I'll be over it soon.

xoxo